The clock is ticking for Howard County’s three high school robotics teams.

Saturday, Kokomo’s TechnoKats, Taylor’s Robo-Titans and Western’s PantherTech teams received their kits and instructions for the 2007 competition game, as did the other competitors around the world.

The three local teams attended the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology robotics kick off regional at Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana’s Kokomo campus, to watch a satellite telecast from FIRST headquarters in Manchester, N.H.

They’ve seen the game for this year’s game, and now have six weeks to construct a robot to play that game in competition.

In this year’s game, competitors will form three-team alliances and will play as either the red alliance or the blue alliance. Robots will attempt to pick up inner tubes and place them on metal forms, similar to jungle gyms, to score points.

At the end of the game, teams may score bonus points for being able to get a robot completely off the ground.

Baker said there is nothing on the field for the robots to get off the floor on, so “you have to use your partner or one of your partners to get you off the floor.”

He said teams have to decide what kind of robot to build — one that will score with the inner tubes, or one that can lift another robot off the ground.

The TechnoKats have been meeting in small groups since Saturday, and today each group will present its idea for the robot concept, advisor Andy Baker said. The team will think about it overnight, and then make a decision Thursday.

Baker said the TechnoKats have a a good veteran leadership base and many enthusiastic younger team members.

“I’m very impressed with our veteran leadership. Going into the season, our shop is the most clean and organized since I’ve been with the team. They wanted to make sure things are organized and clean and ready to go for the season.”

Baker said after a rough season in 2006, he’s excited to see what happens for the TechnoKats in 2007.

“It’s always fun to see how we do. It’s always exciting to see how your creation stacks up to someone else’s creation. I’m excited to see how we do through this build season.

PantherTech Advisor Joe Reel said he has about 25 students signed up, and 18 who will travel to competitions.

He said the team has spent the last few days thinking about what they want to do with their robot.

“We’re looking at different strategies of what we might try to do, trying to figure out what the other teams might do so we don’t get stuck just competing against somebody we can’t win with,” Reel said. “We came up with some ideas on what we might try to do, where the points might be scored, where the maximum points might be beneficial for us.”

Reel said they’re considering what it would take to get a 120-pound robot off the playing field, noting that if they could get both of their alliance partners off the ground, they could score as much as 60 points.

“It’s going to take quite a few inner tubes on that rack to equal that.”

Reel will retire from Western High School as a teacher at the end of the 2006-2007 school year, but said he plans to continue as PantherTech advisor.

“As long as they’ll have me, I’ll stick around and do this. I really enjoy the robotics part of this,” he said.

Mark Pendergast, Robo-Titans team leader, said his team has 19 members this year, “which is amazing, considering we had seven last year” in the team’s first season.

He has six of those seven back on the team, after one graduated.

Fifteen team members attended the kick off, and spent time simulating the game afterwards.

“We had the kids pretend they were robots so we could get some hints how to win. We came up with some concepts for how we might construct the prototype,” he said. “The rule of thumb is, by the end of the week we better pretty well know what we’re making and get going on it.”

Pendergast thinks the game is more challenging this year.

His team is doing one competition, like last year, because of low funding. They did receive a grant from Indiana Workforce Development, which will allow them to stay in Lafayette one night during the Boilermaker Regional.

Pendergast hopes someday to have funding to go to nationals, like the other county teams.

He thinks students learn life lessons from participating in robotics.

“They have a challenge where they have a large number of solutions they can pick from, a limited budget and a limited schedule,” he said. They also get to work with people who have careers in engineering, he said, so they can see if they might be interested in those careers.

He thinks these students have great potential as the future of the United States.

“The people who are going to cure cancer or build cars that run on water, these are the kids that are going to do it.”

Danielle Rush may be reached at (765) 454-8585 or via e-mail at danielle.rush@kokomotribune.com



FIRST competitions:

• St. Louis Regional, March 1-3: TechnoKats, PantherTech

• Boilermaker Regional, Purdue University, March 15-17: TechnoKats, PantherTech, Robo-Titans

• FIRST national championships, Atlanta, April 12-14: TechnoKats, PantherTech